How to Determine the Pace of Marketing Automation Nurture Emails

The pace of a marketing automation nurturing campaign helps you to very effectively manage a relationship over a long period of time with very little effort. Here are the basic rules of pacing, as well as some specific tactics to use in any nurturing campaign to make them more effective.

Follow general pace rules. The general rule of pace is 6-45 (that is, send emails at least six days apart but no longer than 45 days). Many consultants suggest different time frames, but these are the time frames some suggest.

The reason is that a work week has five days, and having your emails sent at a minimum of six days apart is a fail-safe method of preventing two emails in one week. On the other hand, if you are not dropping an email to someone every 45 days, you’re very likely to fall off that person’s radar.

Set things up. Some people are firm believer sin using sets within your nurturing programs. A set is a group of emails that are sent in quick succession, followed by a long pause. The following shows a set of emails in a long nurturing program.

The idea behind a set is to go hard and then slack off. If going hard didn’t work, and you keep it up, you’ll burn out your lead. So learn to work hard in sets, followed by long pauses to be respectful of the prospect’s level of interest.

Act natural. The main goal of nurturing is to have the email appear to be coming from a person. People do not send emails at the same time on the same day every week. So mix it up. Keeping a random pace is good practice.

The following shows a random time pace (6, 8, and 13 days) between each email sent in the nurturing program. This random pacing is very important when you run sales-support nurturing programs.

Realize that a long sales cycle means long pauses. When you have a lengthy sales cycle, lasting many months or years, you have a long time to get the lead into a sales-ready state. Trying to force the lead to that state only damages your chance to build rapport.

So pause for longer periods of time between each email if you have a longer sales cycle. The same concept goes for short sales cycles. If you have a short sales cycle, you have a shorter period of time to convert the lead, so you may have to take a more aggressive pace.